Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
19 November
EGYPTIAN REGIME ALIGNS WITH ISRAEL
On this day in 1977, Egyptian President Sadat became the first Arab leader to visit Israel officially. This was followed by a peace treaty signed in March 1979. The treaty was unpopular in most of the Arab World and the peace with Israel remains a “cold peace”. Egyptian regimes since Sadat have enforced the siege of Gaza, a war crime. The Geneva Convention Art. 54 states: "Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited", as is "destroy[ing]...objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population".
النظام المصري يتحالف مع إسرائيل
19 نوفمبر
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 1977 ، أصبح الرئيس المصري انور السادات أول زعيم عربي يزور إسرائيل رسميًا. وأعقب ذلك توقيع معاهدة سلام في آذار (مارس) 1979. ولم تكن المعاهدة تحظى بشعبية في معظم العالم العربي ، ولا يزال السلام مع إسرائيل "سلامًا باردًا". فرضت الأنظمة المصرية منذ السادات حصار غزة ، وهو جريمة حرب. تنص المادة 54 من اتفاقية جنيف على ما يلي: "يُحظر تجويع المدنيين كأسلوب من أساليب الحرب" ، وكذلك "يحظرتدمير الأشياء الضرورية لبقاء السكان المدنيين على قيد الحياة".
According to Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics at Columbia University:
Since Sadat’s selling out of Egypt to American and Israeli interests in the second half of the 1970s, the Sadatist official press and a whole new class of nouveaux riches Egyptians began a sustained campaign against the Palestinian people. This new class, enriched by their active selling of their country off to the highest bidders, targeted the Palestinians in order to delegitimize their cause in the eyes of millions of Egyptians who have supported them since before 1948 and who opposed the Sadatist sell-out.
The Sadatist and nouveaux riches‘ campaigns would invent stories about Palestinians having lost their country because they themselves were “sell-outs” and had “sold their country to the Jews”. These rumours continue to be widespread in Egyptian society, at all levels, till this very day, sustained as they are by the utter chauvinist hatred engendered by this petty uneducated class, who under Mubarak continued to rob the country clean and impoverish vast sectors of its population, in the process accumulating billions of dollars.